Report On Cabinet Over-Regulation

•Federal regulation is a hidden tax that amounts to nearly $15,000 per U.S. household each year.

•In 2015, 114 laws were enacted by Congress during the calendar year, while 3,410 rules were issued by agencies. Thus, 30 rules were issued for every law enacted last year.

•Many Americans complain about taxes, but regulatory compliance costs exceed the $1.82 trillion that the IRS is expected to collect in both individual and corporate income taxes from 2015.

•Some 60 federal departments, agencies, and commissions have 3,297 regulations in development at various stages in the pipeline.

•The top five federal rulemaking agencies account for 41 percent of all federal regulations. These are the Departments of the Treasury, Commerce, Interior, Health and Human Services, and Transportation.

•The 2015 Federal Register contains 80,260 pages, the third highest page count in its history. Of the seven all-time-highest Federal Register total page counts, six occurred under President Obama.

•The George W. Bush administration averaged 62 major regulations annually over eight years, while the Obama administration has averaged 81 major regulations annually over seven years.

… Agencies do not answer to voters. Yet in a sense, regulators and the administration, rather than Congress, do the bulk of U.S. lawmaking. Years of unbudgeted growth of the federal regulatory enterprise are worrisome when no one can claim with certainty that regulatory benefits exceed costs. But agencies are not the only culprits. For too long, Congress has shirked its constitutional duty to make the tough calls. Instead, it delegates substantial lawmaking power to agencies and then fails to ensure that the regulations deliver benefits that exceed costs.110 Thus, agencies can hardly be the only ones faulted for suboptimal or damaging regulation or for not ensuring that only good rules get through.

The last paragraph appears in the last section, and is accurate in that the multitude of regulations are not routed through Congress as it should be. This is a good extensive report.